Keep the merry, dump the myth?

I came across this recently on Youtube. It's about Christmas, you know keep the merry thing, but don't believe about the Christ thing! I know where these guys are coming from, I do. I have been there, bought the t-shirt. In fact I have a whole closet full of them. But they are greatly myth-taken :-). It is a strange but undeniable fact of the Christian life that when you walk close to the Lord the reality of the Kingdom walks with you, and when you drift away, it all seems so unreal. And the unreality seems to be proportional to the distance you allow between you and Him.

And I do mean allow! As a brash teenager (hundreds of years ago) I told God I did not need Him, and as a consequence drifted away from what I knew to be true. During that time I thought of my earlier beliefs as naive. But then came the time when my life was so messed up, I could no longer deny that I needed help. Times like this are crossroads. We can blame others for the mess we are in, refusing to admit that we had any part in the mess, or we can take stock, fess up and return to the One who loves us so much that He died for us, so that the broken, hurting and sinful like me, can find healing and peace and hope and joy again.

Now part of this drifting away thing, is that I believe the lies. And there are usually two equal an opposite lies that are told, depending on which one you and I are most likely to believe. A victim of abuse for example can, on the one hand, believe that it's all their fault, or that their lives are messed up forever on the other. We can even blame God for allowing this or that to happen.

The thing about a good lie, is that it contains something that (for you or I) is believable, and often some of it is true. The thing about the title to this post, is that nobody has perfect theology, so at least some of the things you and I believe are wrong. Coming back to abuse, it is very clear that others do things that are wrong, and in may ways deserve our resentment. But resentment keeps us stuck, while not really punishing the offender. We need to forgive for our own sake. Forgiveness severs the power the abuser has over us. It is particularly hard if we are blaming God, since deep down we know He has done nothing wrong. However we may still feel that He has, and we will need to forgive Him in order to restore fellowship. He will sort out our confusion about these things when we have forgiven. Another problem in this area is that it is often hard to forgive is ourselves. But again, when we don't, we keep ourselves trapped in self hate!

It helps me to know that all unforgiveness is, in the end, evil. As a Christian I know this because of the severity of the Biblical teaching on this issue. To the extent that I forgive, I will be forgiven. When I come out of denial and take responsibility for my life, I start to see more clearly how much I need to be forgiven. Staying in denial keeps me from intimacy with God, from the reality of His presence that heals restores and comforts me, from the strength to do what I need to do, and the strength not to do the things that I have learned from the School of hard knocks hinder me.

I did not always believe what I now believe about the Bible. I came to it with a dawning realization that this book knows us (knows me). It knows for example that what we do and what we believe are inexorably linked (See Romans 1:18 and coming post). It knows our propensity to rationalize behaviour (Jeremiah 17:9), it knows that there are consequences to what we do, that we reap what we sow. On top of this from the school of hard knocks I discovered more and more, at a deeper and deeper level that the things Bible forbids are the things that bring negative consequences into my life.

But it's not all negative. I more and more discover that as I follow the things it commands I experience the freedom it promises. “If you continue in My Word, You will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free. If the Son shall set you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:31ff). And the more I continue, the more free I am and the more sure I am of the things I have believed. And the less I continue and follow the less sure I am of these things. When I do the things I myself believe to be wrong, then I enter the fog that in my better times I know covers the whole of humanity including yours truly when I grow lukewarm or cease to follow.

In short I have learned by experience that when God says “no,” He does it for my provision and protection. When I fall, and when I fess up to it, then I have Someone on my side to take care of my mess, to set me on my feet, to cleanse me and help me start over. This is what Christmas is all about. This is the reason for the season, this is the ground of my “merry” and the certainty of what some of you guys call the myth. If this is you then, as I said before you are greatly myth-taken and it gets worse, because in addition you are myth-ing out big time :-)!